Jhon Smith

One conversation is all it takes to Startup

After quitting my secure and well paying IBM job, I was headed to Cuppa Bistro, Koramangala with my buddy Sharav. I had the biggest turning point of my life awaiting me around the corner. I had no clue that this place would be the starting point of endless meetings, hangouts, user-meetups. We met up with Thiru and Sharath, 2nd-time entrepreneurs prototyping a hyperlocal news app along with Sachin and Ashu their Commonfloor colleagues. It was eminent that we shared and connected on a different level and an adventure was ahead of us. Although rest of the co-founders were working full time in Commonfloor at the time, we had endless sleepless nights setting things up from our first Android app beta release to Friends and Family first and reaching to about 1K users in one day. We left no stone unturned for this beta release. A free and easy word of mouth social campaign by Thunderclap was a huge success, which was basically a medium to post about your campaign from all supporting users at a given time giving a viral outreach.

I had immense fun adventuring avenues across Backend (PHP, MongoDB), Frontend (JavaScript, Jquery, HTML5, CSS3, Wordpress), Android, iOS (Objective-C), Ads and Analytics (Google, Facebook), DevOps (Hetzner, Apache, zPanel). As the only full-time co-founder, with the aggressive mentoring and help I got my hands dirty with building dashboards, consoles and web app from scratch, trending user experience, latest google and apple guidelines for mobile apps, organising user meetups, creating online and offline marketing funnels. Still, I remember taking a day off amidst an offline marketing campaign tired of managers not taking me seriously. Thanks to a little push from Sharath, covered the whole Koramangala locality in the next day.

We grew about 50K+ users in a couple of months, went till Flipkart seed funding qualifiers round. The fact is, a social product with no direct money model involved is kind of hard to scale, get traction and raise money. This is the Shout story.I believe a blog post won't be enough to share my wonderful experiences with you. Long story short, one biggest trait I picked up was learning and adapting on the go made the journey fun.

Although Shout failed miserably, I had the biggest opportunity to directly interact with users, learn, adapt, evolve with people who shared the similar passion and had loads of fun while doing it. One thing is for sure, more adventures to come before I sleep.

Starting up is like swimming. You just plunge in, have fun and don't forget to breathe!

Links

Media

During a conversation with your peers, have you ever felt the urge to leave everything else and do something about it ?! I would love to hear from you! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.